[Building Sakai] Dialogic learning environment for Sakai
Adrian Fish
a.fish at lancaster.ac.uk
Wed Feb 17 01:57:31 PST 2010
Hi Mark,
Glad to hear that you like YAFT. SharePoint's forum tool was one of the
tools was influenced by whilst designing the minimal view. The different
views you mention are not currently implemented in YAFT, but they could
be. I'll try and get around to creating feature requests in JIRA later
on today.
I couldn't give you anything approaching a realistic estimate of
potential developer costs without an assessment of what functionality is
already out there. It may well be that there are several tools that when
pulled together will already go part of the way to achieving your goals.
This would be my first task: check out what's in the community, both in
core and contrib, do a gap analysis, and then you should have a clearer
idea of the amount of work needed.
You also need to factor in your timescales and decide whether Sakai 3
may be the way to go. I'm taking a pragmatic approach to this involving
writing new tools using a combination of Javascript, Trimpath and Entity
Broker, hoping that this will make more of my stuff portable to Sakai 3
when it's up and running.
Cheers,
Adrian.
Mark Smith wrote:
> Dear Adrian,
>
> Your discussion forum looks like just what we need for beginning to
> transition to Sakai from our current SharePoint system.
>
> Is it possible in your YAFT forum to create customised views: 1) a "current
> postings" view to show only the 300 latest postings, and 2) a view to "show
> all postings"? Is it also possible to change the order of posts: to have the
> latest discussion posts appear at the bottom (rather than the top)? This
> change seems to have increased our students' responses to postings.
>
> Also, if you please, what you think of the doability of our grant and its
> developer costs?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mark
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Adrian Fish [mailto:a.fish at lancaster.ac.uk]
> Sent: Monday, 15 February 2010 9:59
> To: Mark Smith
> Cc: sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org
> Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] Dialogic learning environment for Sakai
>
> Hi Mark,
>
> I'm going to bang my own, shared drum here. Have you had a look at YAFT in
> contrib? It's threaded, minimalistic and very much liked here at Lancaster.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Adrian.
>
> Mark Smith wrote:
>
>> Dear Sakai developers community,
>>
>> We are working on a grant proposal and we need your help in assessing
>> programming work for this project (also, if we get the grant we might
>> need your help in finding people who can work on this project). Over
>> the past 14 years (since 1996, first using Microsoft FrontPage), we
>> have been working to build and improve upon a web-based environment
>> which supports dialogic pedagogy and its emergent pedagogical ecology
>> in our classes at the University of Delaware School of Education. This
>> class web environment has been designed to support a learning ecology
>> of dialogue. In our pedagogical judgment, we have found that web
>> platforms designed and commonly used for education seem to build
>> monologic educational ecologies, in which class web discussions focus
>> on replies to singular topics (like in a FAQ forum), and the
>> pedagogical design emphasizes instructor control and surveillance of
>> students' assignments and discussions. In contrast, we have designed a
>> class web environment that supports a different educational ecology
>> focusing on the participants' messy exploration of ideas generated by
>> the community of learners (this "messiness" embedded in our web design
>> is deliberate as we do not wish to unilaterally organize or control
>> the responsive discourse which emerges in the discussion). In this
>> classroom community of learners, all participants, including the
>>
> instructor, have equal rights for defining and negotiating the theme of
> communal discourse.
>
>> However, we feel that our current web platform has great technological
>> limitations. Most importantly, it is built upon our clumsy integration
>> of Microsoft SharePoint v.1, JavaScript, MSSQL Server 2000, and MS
>> Access technology which cannot be easily shared with other instructors
>> outside of our university. Furthermore, the complexity of our system
>> has rendered it difficult to support for anyone other than someone
>> well-trained in MSSQL Server and MS Access database systems, and takes
>> valuable instructor time to maintain before and throughout the semester.
>>
>> We are currently working on a grant proposal to develop (among other
>> things) our dialogic class web environment on the Sakai platform and
>> would like to ask the Sakai developer community questions regarding
>> the feasibility of our project, as well as the overall costs and time
>> associated with the project (e.g., costs for hiring developers, what
>> types of work would be needed for developers to do, and so forth). Our
>> university, the University of Delaware, has established Sakai as the
>> platform for its course web environments. We would like to create a
>> class web environment that supports dialogic pedagogy on the Sakai
>>
> platform.
>
>> Conceptually, we see a class web environment supporting dialogic
>> pedagogy as much more than a "dialogic tool" to be added to an
>> existing pedagogical framework and structure. It is, we feel, a
>> radical departure from existing educational technology and pedagogy.
>> Although we recognize that pedagogy and technology provide mutual
>> affordances for each other, we consider educational philosophy as the
>> guiding principle for the pedagogical and technological designs for a
>> class web environment. We do not want to sound arrogant, but in our
>> view, the design of many existing class web environments is
>> consciously or unconsciously guided by a conventional monologic
>> educational philosophy based on "covering curriculum" unilaterally
>> preset by the instructor in advance. Consequently, in the current
>> conceptual language used about Sakai, each module is described as a
>> pedagogy-free, self-contained tool. In contrast our approach is
>> ecological rather than instrumental. For example, in a party, we
>> wouldn't speak of a room, or a patio as "a tool" as much as we would
>> consider it a space. Similarly, we look upon the Class Web Environment as
>>
> a learning space with its own ecology instead of a tool.
>
>>
>> To better visualize what we have in mind, we have developed a web site
>> with information about our grant proposal here,
>> http://ematusov.soe.udel.edu/diaped_CWE. We would also encourage
>> anyone to inform us about any current grant opportunities and provide
>> your feedback on any technological challenges we face, criticisms of
>> our approach, and pedagogical design improvements, and any new exciting
>>
> possibilities.
>
>>
>> We have created a Demo site of our class web environment supporting
>> our dialogic pedagogy which allows interested developers and
>> instructors to visualize this web environment,
>> http://www.web-ed.udel.edu/EDUC259.demo
>> (when you get to the Demo Website, you are put in the student's role,
>> which is just the tip of the iceberg of what we have designed for the
>> course). On this site, please notice these key features:
>>
>> 1) Webtalk: A threaded, asynchronous discussion forum which
>>
> deliberately
>
>> has more in common with old NNTP-based newsgroups than currently
>> popular topic-centered FAQ-like designs of many "Web 2.0" discussion
>> forums, wikis and blogs. This design, in our experience, promotes
>> dialogue through the development of a rich threaded network of ideas,
>> in which messages generating RESPONSES are immediately recognizable,
>> and responses to messages can change focus, sometimes 3 or more times
>> in a thread (see http://ematusov.soe.udel.edu/diaped_CWE and the
>> "Webtalk" on the demo web for an example).
>> 2) Progress Report: A system designed for students to become
>>
> responsible
>
>> for their own progress within the class. Currently providing only
>> daily updates to students, students can monitor their progress by
>> seeing how much they OWE the class in terms of work, or how much they
>> have in CREDIT. The report monitors the students' meeting of minimum
>> web participation requirements and any COMPENSATION which they owe or
>> have performed for the class. Students are expected to do a minimum
>> amount of Webtalk postings and weekly "mini-projects" in a given
>> period of time (in the demo class, per week). All compensations are due
>>
> within 3 weeks to keep students engaged.
>
>> See the demo web for an example.
>> 3) Miniprojects: An assignment system which encourages everyone in the
>> class - both instructors and students - to respond to each other's
>> posted work. All assignments are publicly accessible.
>> 4) E-library: Unfortunately, due to copyright and privacy concerns we
>> cannot show you the upper level of our class web environment. The
>> "e-library" has educational resources that instructors share and
>> collaborate
>> on: databases of miniprojects, lesson plans, interesting links,
>> videos, readings, surveys, course evaluations, and so on.
>>
>> Do you think this project is doable on the Sakai platform? If not, why
>>
> not?
>
>> If so, how much time and money might it take?
>>
>> We look forward to your feedback and suggestions
>>
>> Sincerely,
>>
>> Eugene Matusov, School of Education, University of Delaware Mark
>> Smith, School of Education, University of Delaware Ana
>> Marjanovic-Shane, Chestnut Hill College Katherine von Duyke, School of
>> Education, University of Delaware
>>
>> Relevant publications:
>> Matusov, E., Hayes, R., & Pluta, M. J. (2005). Using a discussion web
>> to develop an academic community of learners. Educational Technology &
>> Society, 8(2), 16-39. Available at
>> http://ematusov.soe.udel.edu/vita/Articles/Matusov,%20Hayes,%20Pluto,%
>> 20Usin
>> g%20webs%20for%20developing%20community%20of%20learners,%20THEN,%20200
>> 5.pdf
>>
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>
> --
> ==================================
> Adrian Fish
> Software Engineer
> Centre for e-Science
> Bowland Tower South C Floor
> Lancaster University
> Lancaster
> LA1 4YW
> email: a.fish at lancaster.ac.uk
>
> http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/YAFT/Yaft
> http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/BLOG/Home
> http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/AGORA/Home
>
>
>
>
--
==================================
Adrian Fish
Software Engineer
Centre for e-Science
Bowland Tower South C Floor
Lancaster University
Lancaster
LA1 4YW
email: a.fish at lancaster.ac.uk
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/YAFT/Yaft
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/BLOG/Home
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/AGORA/Home
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